


Maybe you would have been

by 222Ravens



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: 2013, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Coda, M/M, does it count as a coda when it's technically partway through the episode, episode s01e16, finale, the bar scene, yes because I do what I want
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-23 17:49:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8337124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/222Ravens/pseuds/222Ravens
Summary: Ray Palmer walks into a bar.It's not as funny as it sounds.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [areyouarealmonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/areyouarealmonster/gifts).



> author’s note: fuck u sarah

Raymond watches Mick walk on ahead, from the corner of his eye, and decides to let him go. The Waverider is just around the corner, and he’s pretty sure Mick isn’t going to do anything too stupid, _this time_.

The neon lights from the bar bathe his face in red, and he turns away, not wanting to look much longer. The temptation too strong.

It could be worse. Red isn’t the most dangerous color, in terms of memories. He thinks he’ll have to steel himself, looking at lights of a _particular_ shade of blue-green. Maybe for a long time. The way it had been, at the Oculus, what must have been the last thing that…

It’s hard thinking of his name, somehow. But also easier, now that he said it out loud. Even if he’d only managed that, too late. _Leonard_.

His eyes focus on the pavement, under his feet, and for half a minute, that’s almost enough to ground him. When he looks up, it’s to Rip, looking at him, quizzically.

“Why _did_ you ask to come with us, anyway?” Rip says, and Ray does everything in his power not to let his face slip, not to give the game away.

He’d been kinda counting on Mick to be too wrapped up in grief, which had worked, to his credit. And then, similarly, for Rip to be too, well, _Rip_ , to even notice his presence, really.

One out of two isn’t that bad, he supposes. But now he’s got to come up with an excuse. What slips out is a smile, false bravado. “Oh, you know. Moral support. Stretch my legs. Keep Mick out of trouble.”

“Oh. Right. Makes sense. Shall we, then?”

There we go. The trademark Rip Hunter, honestly-kind-of-a-human-disaster, in all his glory.

Not that Raymond can really talk.

Because _just_ when he was thinking he could breathe a sigh of relief? When he’d been thinking that was it, that was e _nough_. That he could pack these feelings into the box where he keeps everyone else in his life who was an ‘almost’.

Well. They come crashing home, anyway, and it slips out, before he can catch hold. Whoops.

“Actually... I’ll be a minute. Going to. Use the bathroom first?”

Rip, the man he is somehow willing to trust being his leader, with the security of the entire timeline, just. Blinks, and says, “There’s one back on the Waverider. Probably more… Sanitary.”

Um. Find a cover, quick. Another smooth, bright smile, not letting any of the jagged edges show. “Yes, but! I drank a lot of coffee earlier.”

A shrug, and Rip extends an arm, bemused. “By all means, then.”

The bar lights are just as red, but he walks towards them, anyway, hands in his pockets.

He’s an idiot, but he’s known that for a while, and he doesn’t let that stop him. He just moves forward, in order to look back. In order to _know._

It’s easy, when for that little while, it had been so difficult to trust in his own actions. In everything he’d done on the Waverider, to not be sure that he hadn’t been manipulated the entire time. If any of it was real, from the first moment to the end.

 _This is madness_ , he thinks, walking into the bar, and it almost stops him short, because that’s not the kind of phrasing he’d use, normally, and there’s an echo in his head, the familiarity of the words pulling something loose.

_This is madness. I like it._

The last words Leonard had spoken to him, and Raymond hadn’t known how to feel about them. So he’d let Snart walk off to talk to Sara, and he’d eaten _cupcakes_ and talked to Mick, instead.

Wasted time, not letting himself think about how it was the last.

And then Mick had gone and sacrificed himself for him, and then Leonard had…

Raymond ducks his head, entering. It’s a dive bar, to put it bluntly, a lurid neon sign advertising GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS. Seemingly not much of a draw, considering the pretty sparse clientele.

He almost doesn’t see at first, until he does.

Until he does, until he notices the curve of _his_ head, that distinctive silhouette, and breath seizes in his chest.

The thing is. He _hadn’t_ known, until just now, not really. Hadn’t put the pieces together, of that potentiality that he’d never grasped. Not even when Leonard had died, when he’d been so caught up in the sacrifice, wanting to ascribe how he felt to… Friendship. To guilt. Admiration of an unexpected hero.

Or coming back home, to realize that months had passed, and he wasn’t the person he used to be. To having no life worth returning to, and finding Mick, because that was a lifeline, something pulling him forward, honoring what Leonard would have wanted.

What had Leonard wanted? How had he been _so sure_ that Leonard would have trusted him to watch Mick’s back, get revenge for him... No. Maybe hadn’t even been the first plan. _Maybe_ , what he’d planned was something different.

To fill his shoes. Be a thief, sow chaos, do something utterly _unlike_ him, because Leonard’s death had left him adrift. Pick up the cold gun, and let it freeze everything over, inside and out. Because why not?

It would have been what he was _choosing_ to do. Leonard had given him that, given him back his choices, when all of his life might never have belonged to him. Every action not his own, but guided by some other hand.

Yet. This bar he was standing in. Nobody had made him, but it still feels inevitable, standing here, looking at the curve of a head turned away from him, from across a room, trying to breathe, and not fall apart.

Until memory floods back, too much at once, just from the shape of how he sits, the curve of an ear.  Until the head moves to turn in his direction, and he isn’t brave enough for that.

So he does use the bathroom, for several long minutes, standing in the cramped stall to get his bearings, because he feels unmoored.

His eyes unfocus a little, staring at the cracked wall tiling in the bathroom, the afterimage circling in his head, the knowledge of who is out there, in that bar. All the things he could mean, and suddenly it's too much. There's a sharp noise, as he slams his hand into the wall, feeling a little dangerous, a little reckless. It hurts, and the pain is enough to bring him back to sanity, to what he _can’_ _t_.

He tries to leave, subtly, but the bartender catches his attention as he’s leaving. Puts a beer down on the counter, meaningfully. “I didn’t order…”

“Fella over there.”

He turns, and sees Leonard, looking right at him, a sardonic smile on his face. Not scattered into atoms, or cold with angry purpose. He looks a little on edge, but he’s brightly alive, and there’s a heat there that he hadn’t been expecting.

It was a mistake, because Leonard _had seen him_ , and what if this interfered with the timeline, what if…

Leonard Snart was trying to _pick him up._

Raymond stares down at the beer, touches it with one finger. Feels the slick of condensation on the glass, the ragged edge of the label, and something in him shifts.

He could have _this_ , if he wanted. Just the once, and it probably wouldn’t even do much to the timeline. Maybe it would just explain certain things, that occasional undercurrent he swore he remembered, from their interactions, the mocking way he’d drawled ‘ _pretty boy_ ’.

Or maybe he wouldn’t be remembered at all. The ease of his smile suggests that he must do this sort of thing all the time, enough faces that one more wouldn’t be memorable enough to interrupt things.

Did he? Or was it just something about Raymond, something about tonight, that brought it out? He’d never know.

But he could know something, at least, about what it would’ve been like.

He could walk over to that table, with the beer, and say _yes_ to one chance, a few stolen moments in the bathroom, or whatever shitty apartment the Leonard Snart of 2013 called home.

Have that heat, that fire, let it burn him before he had to move on, and bury everything back up again.

Rip couldn’t judge him for that, not after everything. No one on the team really would. He could be selfish, just this once.

Except.

The beer is in his hand, as he looks up at this man, this _ghost_ , and for a moment it’s hard for him to say _Leonard_ again. He sees Snart, the cold armor of the man that had been all he could see when they met.

And that isn’t what he wants.

That isn’t the feeling he’d had in his chest, walking the dusty ground of Salvation, and knowing he was safe because of the person who’d had his back.

That isn’t the same look in his eyes, when Mick had asked him to choose his side, back in space. When Raymond had felt cold all over, still, from almost-hypothermia, almost dying, and he’d thought he knew Snart, thought he’d known what side he would fall on, because _be a survivor_. Because _Russia_ , because that was the kind of man he was. 

Until their eyes had met, just for a moment, a second in time, and he’d seen something shift in them, and he’d forgotten the cold, he’d been so intent on that gaze. The feeling that had lasted that moment it had taken, for Leonard make a different call. Pick the team. Pick _h_ …

He thinks that was the first real moment he’d thought _Leonard_ , instead of Snart. Or maybe it was earlier.

It's his own fault, he'd been too concerned with other things to catch it. Or maybe it's the fault of fate, that had pushed him onto a different path. It doesn't matter, now, not when the end result is the same. All of the moments are a blur, and there _weren’t enough of them_ , and it isn’t fair.

But he can’t go backwards and get them back. This would just be stealing. It would be letting himself have a half-measure of what he wants, and then he’d be back to his usual pattern, of wishing he hadn’t let himself have that, because it always just ended..

Better to make a clean break, he thinks, ignoring the ragged hole in his chest.

So he gives an ironic salute to the man he didn't truly know. A shake of his head, and forces himself to look away. Puts the beer back on the bar.

“Thanks, but… Not tonight, I think.”

Not _ever,_ but that’s another story.

A story he isn’t ever going to get to tell, but that’s his life.

The future stretched out ahead of him, and the past, because Raymond Palmer wasn’t going to let himself have the present.

He was a time traveler, always going to have part of himself wrapped up in his mistakes, his lost moments. All of the people he might have loved, given the chance to. Everything he could have ever achieved, given enough time or circumstance. Those he might have saved.

That’s who he was, now.

He was going to let that happen. Let part of his heart belong to the cold feeling of knowing he never was going to be as good a hero as he wanted to be.

Of always remembering a hero who was never the villain he said he was.

-

At a table, Leonard Snart watches a very pretty man walk out of the bar, and, a little disappointed, decides to get shit-faced drunk.

He’ll wake up the next morning, a biting hangover, and he won’t let himself think about heroes for a very long time.

**Author's Note:**

> seriously this was all your fault, Sarah  
> ~Dubious
> 
> (I'm @DubiousCA on twitter, dubiousculturalartifact on tumblr, and I absolutely love comments, if you feel like it. :)


End file.
